There would be no history of illegal abortion to tell
without the continuing
demand for abortion from women, regardless of law. Generations of women
persisted in controlling their reproduction through abortion and made abortion
an issue for legal and medical authorities. Those women, their lives, and their
perspectives are central in this book. Their demand for abortions, generally
hidden from public view and rarely spoken of in public, transformed medical
practice and law over the course of the twentieth century.

This book analyzes the triangle of interactions among the medical profession,
state authorities, and women in the practice, policing, and politics of
abortion during the era when abortion was a crime. As individual women
consulted with doctors, they made them understand their needs. Sympathy for
their female patients drew physicians into the world of abortion in spite of
legal and professional prohibitions. Indeed, it was physicians and lawyers who
initiated the earliest efforts to rewrite the abortion laws. Ultimately,
women's pressing need for abortion fueled a mass movement that succeeded in
reversing public policy toward abortion in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Public policy made at the national and state levels deserves to be examined
where it was carried out: at the local level, in one-on-one interactions and on
a day-to-day basis. Understanding the impact of abortion law requires analyzing
the actual practice of abortion and the state's enforcement of the criminal
laws. The stunning transformation in law and public policy regarding abortion
and women's rights was rooted in the declining conditions of abortion under the
criminal law and built on generations of women demanding abortions --
and getting them.

"One Woman's Abortion" by Mrs. X (1965). Each year for hundreds of thousands of American women there is a wide
gulf between what the law forbids and what they feel they must do. The
author of this article, whose credentials are trusted by The Atlantic, is a
college graduate in her forty-sixth year, the mother of three children,
living with her husband and family in one of the many commuter
communities in the East.

This is the first study of the entire era of illegal abortion in the United
States. Most scholarship on abortion has focused on two moments of legal
change: when abortion was criminalized in the mid-nineteenth century, and when
it was decriminalized a hundred years later in the mid-1960s and early 1970s.
The century of illegal abortion is typically treated as obscure and unchanging.
I find, however, that the history of illegal abortion was dynamic, not
static.

This book joins a growing literature that interrogates and reconceptualizes the
relationship between the public and the private. The nineteenth-century
ideology of "separate spheres" bifurcated the world into the "public sphere,"
the world of politics and business in which men lived, and the 'private
sphere," the domestic world of women and children. The concept of separate
spheres proved to be fruitful for women's historians and produced an abundance
of important new insights and knowledge. Recently, however, women's historians
have questioned the idea of separate spheres both because it excluded the
majority of women who were working class or women of color and because it
inaccurately described white middle-class life. The worlds of men and women no
longer appear to be as exclusive and separate as once thought: men lived in the
private sphere too, and women walked on public streets, participated in
business, worked for wages, and intervened in political life; indeed, women
created issues of national political importance. Of recently renewed
theoretical interest to a variety of scholars is the public sphere itself.
Here, attention has been on the nature of the public sphere, its membership,
democratic discourse, citizenship, and the formation of public opinion and
debate.

This book challenges the dichotomy between public and private in another way.
It looks more toward the private sphere and finds interaction between what have
been assumed to be two distinct spheres. The relationship between public and
private is dynamic; it is not just that the public has invaded private life or
that excluded, politically unrecognized groups, including women, have found
ways to move into public life. Rather, during the period of this study, the
private invaded the public. Abortion is an example of how private activities
and conversations reshaped public policy. The words and needs of women had the
power to change medicine, law, and public debate. The public sphere, moreover,
was not the only place where crucial communication and spirited debate
occurred. They occurred in "private" arenas such as the home and the medical
office. Those conversations, generally designated "private" and thus irrelevant
to public discourse, impacted debates in the public sphere and eventually
changed public policy. For over a century, women challenged public policy and
altered medical thinking and practice through their conversation and activity
in private arenas. I use the terms private and public, but with a
sense of their ambiguity and interaction.

Analysis of public policy should examine how policy has been implemented and
by whom, rather than be narrowly restricted to federal legislation or agency
activity. Looking at statutes alone, or the actions of legislators or the
judiciary, inhibits our view of how law works, how public policy is made, and
who acts on behalf of the state to enforce the law. Abortion serves as a case
study for rethinking the nature of the state in the United States. Much of the
regulation of abortion was carried out not by government agents, but by
voluntary agencies and individuals. The state expected the medical profession
to assist in enforcing the law. It may be more accurate to think of the state
apparatus not as the government, but as consisting of official agencies that
work in conjunction with other semiofficial agencies. State officials, this
history and others show, have often relied on "private" agents to act as part
of the state.

Feminist scholars in the 1970s tended to see the medical profession as the
source of the regulation of female sexuality and reproduction, but the medical
profession's role was more complex. This book shifts attention to the state's
interest in controlling abortion and the alliance between medicine and the
state. It would have been virtually impossible for the state to enforce the
criminal abortion laws without the cooperation of physicians. State officials
won medical cooperation in suppressing abortion by threatening doctors and
medical institutions with prosecution or scandal. Physicians learned to protect
themselves from legal trouble by reporting to officials women injured or dying
as a result of illegal abortions. By the 1940s and 1950s, physicians and
hospitals had become so accustomed to this regulatory stance toward women and
abortion that they instituted new regulations to observe and curb the practice
of abortion in the hospital. The medical profession and its institutions acted
as an arm of the state.

Yet the medical profession's position was contradictory. While physicians
helped control abortion, they too were brought under greater control. State
officials demanded that the profession police the practices of its members. The
duty of self-policing and physicians' fears of prosecution for abortion created
dilemmas for doctors who at times compromised their duties to patients in order
to carry out their duties to the state.

Furthermore, plenty of physicians provided abortions. This book points to the
power of patients, even female patients, to influence and change medical
practice. The widespread practice of abortion by physicians attests to both the
ability of patients to communicate their needs to physicians and the ability of
physicians to listen. Physicians' practices were shaped by the experiences and
perspectives of private life, not only by professional antiabortion values. The
physician-patient relationship was often more close than distant. This was
particularly true in the early twentieth century, but became more class
stratified as medicine became increasingly specialized and hospital oriented.
Medicine was more of a negotiated terrain between physicians and patients than
has been realized.

The peaks of the medical profession's public hostility to abortion have
obscured the depth of medical involvement in abortion. The antiabortion stance
of organized medicine should not be mistaken for an accurate representation of
the views and practices of the entire profession. This study views the medical
profession as complex and composed of competing groups with opposing views and
practices rather than as a unified whole. The medical profession was not
monolithic, but divided in its attitude toward abortion and in its treatment of
patients. This book differentiates between organized medicine and individual
physicians. By "organized medicine," I mean medicine's institutional
structures, such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and other medical
societies, medical schools, and hospitals that produced the official, public
image of the profession and acted in concert with the state. Furthermore, this
study distinguishes between prescriptive commentary about medical practices, as
found in the medical literature, and actual practice by physicians. These
official and instructional materials reveal the thought, and perhaps the
practice, of only a few. Finally, attention to specialization is crucial.
Specialists played critical public roles in the history of abortion, their
interests and those of general practitioners were not identical.

This book is the first to chart the nation's enforcement of the criminal
abortion laws. To understand the power of law in the lives of the masses of
Americans requires that one take seriously the experiences of ordinary people
caught in criminal investigations. Thus it is necessary to analyze the
processes and routine procedures of the legal system that shape those
experiences. Most historians of crime and punishment have focused on police and
prisons, while historians of women and the law have focused mainly on marriage
and property rights, not crime. Surprisingly little historical work has
examined the relationship between medicine and law. Few have studied law in
practice. Analysis of the day-to-day workings of the legal system, rather than
statutory changes, judicial rulings, or the volume of cases, reveals how the
law intervened in the lives of ordinary citizens to regulate reproductive and
sexual behavior."

Punishment for violation of the law and sexual norms has been gendered. In
abortion cases, the investigative procedures themselves constituted a form of
punishment and control for women. Publicity and public exposure of women's
transgressions further served as punishment. This form of punishment served, in
Michel Foucault's words, as "a school." The shame of public exposure was for
all of "the potentially guilty," not only the individual who had been caught.
This eighteenth-century mode of punishment, thought to have been replaced by
the surveillance of the prison, persisted in the state's response to women and
their sexual crimes. Without analyzing gender, we cannot fully understand the
systems of punishment.

Even as the abortion statutes remained the same through this period, the
meaning of the law and the legality and illegality of abortion changed over
time. Law is not fixed, but fluid. The criminal abortion laws passed in every
state by T880 made exceptions for therapeutic abortions performed in order to
save a woman's life. Because the laws governing abortion did not precisely
define what was criminal and what was not, this had to be worked out in
practice, in policing, and in the courts. The complexity of defining "legal"
and "illegal" abortions for medical practitioners and legal authorities alike,
the gray and ever-shifting nature of "criminality," is an important theme in
this book. Nor was medical understanding of therapeutic abortion stable.
Medicine too is interpretive and changing. Throughout the period of illegal
abortion, physicians disagreed on the conditions that mandated a therapeutic
abortion and on the methods: there was no consensus. Changes in medicine
influenced legal definitions of crime; at the same time, the law shaped medical
thinking and practice. The medical profession and the legal profession each
looked to the other to define the legality of abortion practices. Therapeutic
abortion became increasingly important in the 1930s; by the 1960s the practice
(and nonpractice) of therapeutic abortion was at the very heart of the campaign
to reform and repeal the criminal abortion laws.

The illegality of abortion has hidden the existence of an unarticulated,
alternative, popular morality, which supported women who had abortions. This
popular ethic contradicted the law, the official attitude of the medical
profession, and the teachings of some religions. Private discussions among
family and friends, conversations between women and doctors, and the behavior
of women (and the people who aided them) suggest that traditional ideas that
accepted early abortions endured into the twentieth century. Furthermore,
through the 1920s at least, working-class women did not make a distinction
between contraceptives and abortion. What I call a popular morality that
accepted abortion was almost never publicly expressed but was rooted in
people's daily lives. Americans have a long history of accepting abortion in
certain situations as a necessity and as a decision that, implicitly, belongs
to women to make. This popular attitude made itself felt in the courts and in
doctors' offices: prosecutors found it difficult to convict abortionists
because juries regularly nullified the law by acquitting abortionists, and few
physicians escaped the pressure from women for abortions. Throughout the period
of illegal abortion, women asserted their need for abortion and, in doing so,
implicitly asserted their sense of having a right to control their own
reproduction.

I am not suggesting a "gap" between people's beliefs and their ability to live
up to them, but different, even oppositional, moral perspectives. The values
expressed by ordinary people deserve to be taken seriously rather than
categorized and dismissed as sinful or mistaken. Though some felt guilt about
abortion and found ways to justify their behavior, others never held the
official antiabortion views. Prescribed morality and popular morality may not
be identical. Analysis of women's practices and ideas -- popular
behavior and
belief -- rather than exclusive focus on the statements of male
theologians and
philosophers suggests that it is incorrect to conclude that hostility to
abortion is "almost an absolute value in history." The reverse may be more
accurate.

Although this book takes note of religious teachings and the religious
background of women who had abortions, it does not focus on religious opinion.
Organized religion had little interest in abortion until it entered the public,
political arena in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was no reason to
energetically fight abortion when, for nearly a century, abortion was a crime
and no social movement suggested otherwise. From the 1920s on, however, there
was much religious interest in, and division over, another method of
reproductive control: contraception. Birth control became a topic of interest
because a movement advocated women's right to reproductive control. Further, it
is incorrect to assume that the Catholic Church has always organized against
abortion or that all Catholics subscribe to the views of their church leaders.
Indeed, many Catholics shared what I have described as a popular ethic
accepting abortion. A good history of religion and reproductive control would
examine not only theology and sermons, but also the attitudes and actions of
the congregations, with particular attention to women.

Women who had abortions did so within a context of illegality and religious
disapproval, but the prohibitions were ambiguous. Christian traditions had
tabooed abortion since antiquity, but the acceptance of abortion in order to
save the life of a pregnant woman had a long tradition as well. Until the
mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic Church implicitly accepted early abortions
prior to ensoulment. Not until T869, at about the same time that abortion
became politicized in this country, did the church condemn abortion; in 1895,
it condemned therapeutic abortion. Protestant churches accepted abortion when
pregnancy threatened a woman's life, a view shared by the medical profession
and written into the nation's laws. Jewish tradition clearly viewed the woman's
life as primary. The Mishnah, a code of ancient Jewish law that guided later
rabbinic thought, required abortion when childbirth threatened a woman's life,
for "her life takes precedence over its life."

This study points to the importance of studying the social history of
sexuality as well as the medical and legal discourse about it. These discourses
regarding abortion are important because they introduced new meanings of
abortion and shaped people's views (and fears) of abortion and sexuality. I
analyze the language women used to describe abortion and the production of
stories about abortion in the press and in the courtroom. Yet exclusive
attention to professional or even popular discourse about abortion would result
in a distorted picture of that history. Medical discourse has convinced some
scholars that physicians did not perform abortions in the period of illegal
abortion, and most press coverage of abortion in the early twentieth century
gives the misleading impression that abortion was universally condemned and
generally fatal. These conclusions are not correct. Analysis of discourse alone
would miss the ongoing medical practice of abortion in total contradiction of
official medical mores. As others have pointed out, Foucault's theory
concerning the production of sexuality through discourse ignores differences in
the power of individuals and social groups to enter and shape discourse. The
publicly articulated and published discussion of abortion rarely included the
voices or perspectives of women who had abortions, except to provide shocking
examples of depraved womanhood. Women who had abortions did not intervene to
explain themselves, but instead, in other nonpublic arenas, made their
perspectives known and acted to obtain a much-needed method for preventing
births. More tolerant attitudes toward abortion, rooted in material
experiences, persisted in the face of a public discourse that denounced it. The
history of sexuality and reproduction demands a combined analysis of ideas and
practice.

Common Law and the Criminalization of Abortion

Abortion was not always a crime. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, abortion of early pregnancy was legal under common law. Abortions
were illegal only after "quickening," the point at which a pregnant woman could
feel the movements of the fetus (approximately the fourth month of pregnancy).
The common law's attitude toward pregnancy and abortion was based on an
understanding of pregnancy and human development as a process rather than an
absolute moment. Indeed, the term abortion referred only to the miscarriages of
later pregnancies, after quickening. What we would now identify as an early
induced abortion was not called an abortion at all. If an early pregnancy
ended, it had "slipp[ed] away," or the menses had been "restored." At
conception and the earliest stage of pregnancy before quickening, no one
believed that a human life existed; not even the Catholic Church took this
view. Rather, the popular ethic regarding abortion and common law were grounded
in the female experience of their own bodies.

Colonial and early-nineteenth-century women, historians have learned,
perceived conception as the "blocking" or "obstructing" of menstruation, which
required attention. The cessation of the menses indicated a worrisome imbalance
in the body and the need to bring the body back into balance by restoring the
flow. This idea of menstruation corresponded with medical and popular
understanding of sickness and health. The body was a delicate system of
equilibrium that could easily be thrown out of balance -- by a change
in weather
or diet, for example -- and that then needed to be restored through active
intervention. A disruption in the healthy body, in the worldview of patients
and physicians, required a visible, often violent, physical response to
treatment in order to restore equilibrium. This theory underlay eighteenth and
nineteenth-century regular medical practice, which emphasized heroic
measures -- bleeding, blistering, purging, and puking -- in
response to sickness.
The response to the blocking of the menses was part of this shared
understanding of the body: women took drugs in order to make their menses
regular and regarded the ensuing vomiting and evacuation as evidence of the
drugs' effective action.

Restoring the menses was a domestic practice. The power of certain herbs to
restore menstruation was widely known. One colonial woman who feared pregnancy
had "twice taken Savin; once boyled in milk and the other time strayned through
a Cloath." Savin, derived from juniper bushes, was the most popular
abortifacient and easily acquired since junipers grew wild throughout the
country. Other herbs used as abortifacients included pennyroyal, tansy, ergot,
and seneca snakeroot. Slave women used cottonroot. Many of these useful plants
could be found in the woods or cultivated. in gardens, and women could refer to
home medical guides for recipes for "bringing on the menses."

Both of these concepts, blocked menses and quickening, must be taken seriously
by late-twentieth-century observers. Blocked menses cannot be dismissed as an
excuse made by women who knew they were pregnant. Quickening was a moment
recognized by women and by law as a defining moment in human development. Once
quickening occurred, women recognized a moral obligation to carry the fetus to
term. This age-old idea underpinned the practice of abortion in America. The
legal acceptance of induced miscarriages before quickening tacitly assumed that
women had a basic right to bodily integrity.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the most common means of inducing
abortion -- by
taking drugs was commercialized. The availability of abortifacients was so
well-known that a common euphemism described their use. When Sarah Grosvenor, a
Connecticut farm girl, confided to her sister in 1742 that she was "taking the
trade," her sister understood. That Grosvenor successfully conveyed her meaning
to her sister in three metaphoric words tells us a great deal about the world
of mid-eighteenth-century New England. Many New Englanders, including these
sisters, knew of the possibility of inducing an abortion by purchasing and
ingesting drugs. The need for a euphemism tells of the difficulty of speaking
openly about sex and reproductive control and of the need for secrecy. Yet it
reveals an awareness that women could and did regulate their own fertility
through abortion. Furthermore, abortifacients had become a profitable product
sold by doctors, apothecaries, and other healers.

The first statutes governing abortion in the United States, James Mohr has
found, were poison control measures designed to protect pregnant women like
Grosvenor by controlling the sale of abortifacient drugs, which often killed
the women who took them. The proliferation of entrepreneurs who openly sold and
advertised abortifacients may have inspired this early legislation, passed in
the 1820s and 1830s. The 18 Illinois law, which prohibited the provision of
abortifacients, was listed under "poisoning."

It is crucial to recognize what these early-nineteenth-century laws did not
cover: they did not punish women for inducing abortions, and they did not
eliminate the concept of quickening. Even as poison control measures, they said
nothing about growing the plants needed in one's own garden or mixing together
one's own home remedy in order to induce an abortion. The legal silence on
domestic practices suggests that the new laws were aimed at the
commercialization of this practice and, implicitly, retained to women the right
to make their own decisions about their pregnancies before quickening.

By the 1840s, the abortion business boomed. Despite the laws forbidding the
sale of abortifacients, they were advertised in the popular press and could be
purchased from physicians or pharmacists or through the mail. If drugs failed,
women could go to a practitioner who specialized in performing instrumental
abortions. Advertisements and newspaper exposes made it appear that what had
been an occasional domestic practice had become a daily occurrence performed
for profit in northern cities. Madame Restell, for example, openly advertised
and provided abortion services for thirty-five years. Restell began her
abortion business in New York City in the late 1830s; by the mid-1840s, she had
offices in Boston and Philadelphia and traveling agents who sold her "Female
Monthly Pills." Restell became the most infamous abortionist in the country,
but she was not the only abortionist. The clientele of these busy clinics were
primarily married, white, native-born Protestant women of the upper and middle
classes.

In 1857, the newly organized AMA initiated a crusade to make abortion at every
stage of pregnancy illegal. The antiabortion campaign grew in part, James Mohr
has shown, out of regular physicians' desire to win professional power, control
medical practice, and restrict their competitors, particularly Homeopaths and
midwives. "Regular," or "orthodox," physicians, practitioners of "heroic"
medicine, had come under attack in the 1820s and 1830s as elitist. They faced
competition from a variety of practitioners from other medical sects,
collectively known as "Irregulars." Through the 1870S, regular physicians
across the country worked for the passage of new criminal abortion laws. In
securing criminal abortion laws, the Regulars won recognition of their
particular views as well as some state control over the practice of
medicine.

Though professional issues underlay the medical campaign, gender, racial, and
class anxieties pushed the criminalization of abortion forward. The visible use
of abortion by middle-class married women, in conjunction with other challenges
to gender norms and changes in the social makeup of the nation, generated
anxieties among American men of the same class. Birth rates among the Yankee
classes had declined by mid-century while immigrants poured into the country.
Antiabortion activists pointed out that immigrant families, many of them
Catholic, were larger and would soon outpopulate native-born white Yankees and
threaten their political power. Dr. Horatio R Storer, the leader of the medical
campaign against abortion, envisioned the spread of "civilization" west and
south by native-born white Americans, not Mexicans, Chinese, Blacks, Indians,
or Catholics. "Shall" these regions, he asked, "be filled by our own children
or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their
loins depends the future destiny of the nation." Hostility to immigrants,
Catholics, and people of color fueled this campaign to criminalize abortion.
White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among white
Protestant women.

The antiabortion campaign was antifeminist at its core. Women were condemned
for following "fashion" and for avoiding the self-sacrifice expected of
mothers. "The true wife," Storer declared, did not seek `'undue power in public
life, . . . undue control in domestic affairs, . . . [or] privileges not her
own." The antiabortion campaign was a reactionary response to two important
efforts of the nineteenth-century women's movements: the fight to admit women
into the regular medical profession and the battle to make men conform to a
single standard of sexual behavior. The antiabortion campaign coincided with
the fight by male Regulars to keep women out of their medical schools,
societies, and hospitals. Boston and Harvard University, Storer's hometown and
alma mater, were key sites of struggle over women's place in medicine, and
Storer was personally engaged in the battle against female physicians.
Advocates of women in medicine argued that women doctors would protect women
patients from sexual violation. Regular male doctors degraded female physicians
by accusing them, along with midwives, of performing abortions.

The relative morality of men and women was of crucial importance to this
campaign. For the specialists, whose interest in the female reproductive system
raised questions about their sexual morality, the antiabortion campaign was a
way to proclaim their own high morality in contrast to their competitors, their
female patients, and even the ministers who tolerated abortion. It was at the
same time a backlash against the women's movement's critique of male sexual
behavior and feminist claims to political power. Nineteenth-century feminists
expressed their anger with male sexual domination and promiscuity in a number
of movements, including the campaigns against prostitution and slavery and the
fight for temperance. All sections of the women's movement advocated "voluntary
motherhood," a slogan that addressed both men's sexual violation of their wives
and women's desire to control childbearing. Women saw themselves as morally
superior and urged men to adopt a single standard -- the female
standard of
chastity until marriage, followed by monogamy and moderation. The campaign
against abortion challenged this feminist analysis of men by condemning women
for having abortions. Indeed, Storer compared abortion to prostitution and, in
so doing, called into question all claims made by middle-class
nineteenth-century women on the basis of moral superiority. "There is little
difference," he proclaimed, "between the immorality" of the man who visited
prostitutes and the woman who aborted. The nineteenth-century women's movements
never defended abortion, but activist women and women doctors were blamed for
the practice of abortion nonetheless.

The antiabortion campaign attempted to destroy the idea of quickening. As
physicians targeted quickening, they discredited women's experiences of
pregnancy and claimed pregnancy as medical terrain. "Quickening," as Storer
described it, "is in fact but a sensation." A sensation that had emotional,
social, and legal meaning was thus denigrated. Quickening was based on women's
own bodily sensations -- not on medical diagnosis. It made physicians, and
obstetricians in particular, dependent on female self-diagnosis and judgment.
Quickening could not be relied upon as an indicator of fetal life because,
Storer argued, it did not occur at a standard moment. "Many women never quicken
at all," he joked about women's perceptions, "though their children are born
living." Storer's propaganda aimed to erase the distinctions between earlier
and later stages of pregnancy, thereby redefining the restoration of the
menses. What had previously been understood as a blockage and a restoration of
the menses prior to quickening was now associated with inducing a miscarriage
after quickening by labeling it abortion. Furthermore, Storer equated abortion
with infanticide.

Regular medical men had entered the debate about sexual politics by attacking
the female practice of abortion as immoral, unwomanly, and unpatriotic. In
giving abortion new meaning, the Regulars provided a weapon that white,
native-born, male legislators could use against the women of their own class
who had been agitating for personal and political reform. Regular physicians
won passage of new criminal abortion laws because their campaign appealed to a
set of fears of white, nativeborn, male elites about losing political power to
Catholic immigrants and to women. Class privilege did not protect middle-class
white women from public policy designed to control them. Although the
criminalization of abortion was aimed at middle-class white women, it affected
women of every class and race. The new laws passed across the country between
1860 and 1880 regarded abortion in an entirely different light from common law
and the statutes regulating abortifacients. In general, the laws included two
innovations: they eliminated the common-law idea of quickening and prohibited
abortion at any point in pregnancy. Some included punishment for the women who
had abortions. The "Comstock Law" passed in 1873 included abortion and birth
control in federal antiobscenity legislation; states and municipalities passed
similar ordinances.

The antiabortion laws made one exception: physicians could perform therapeutic
abortions if pregnancy and childbirth threatened the woman's life. A bill
criminalizing abortion unless done for "bona fide medical or surgical
purposes" passed the Illinois state legislature unanimously and was signed into
law in 1867. A few years later, Illinois passed another law prohibiting the
sale of abortifacients but made an exception for "the written prescription of
some well known and respectable practicing physician." Physicians had won the
criminalization of abortion and retained to themselves alone the right to
induce abortions when they determined it necessary.

Through the antiabortion campaign, doctors claimed scientific authority to
define life and death. In so doing, they claimed the authority of religious
leaders. In leading this moral crusade and thoroughly criticizing the
ministry's lack of interest in abortion, regular doctors set themselves above
religious leaders as well as above the general populace. The medical
profession's claim to moral purity and the authority of the clergy was a
stepping-stone to greater social authority. Regular physicians won an important
victory when they persuaded the nation's states to criminalize abortion.
Physicians entered a new partnership with the state and won the power to set
reproductive policy. In the process, women's perceptions of pregnancy were
delegitimated and women lost what had been a common-law right.

Periodization: Changing Patterns of Illegal Abortion

During the more than one hundred years that abortion was illegal in the United
States, the patterns; practice, policing, and politics of abortion all changed
over time, though not always simultaneously. I trace the history along several
lines at once, according to the location, practice, and availability of
abortion as well as its regulation. Abortion was widely available throughout
much of the era when abortion was a crime. Yet periods of tolerance were
punctuated by moments of severe repression. At some points the changing
structure of medicine brought about crucial changes in the history of abortion;
at others, changes in women's lives or the political and economic context came
to the fore.

In the nineteenth century, abortion came under attack at a moment when women
were claiming political power; in the twentieth century, it came under attack
when they claimed sexual freedom. Abortion, like contraception, means that
women can separate sex and procreation -- still a controversial notion.
Antiabortion campaigns developed when women asserted sexual independence, as
during the Progressive Era and since the 1970s. When abortion was most firmly
linked to the needs of family rather than the freedoms of women, as during the
Depression, it was most ignored by those who would suppress it. Periods of
antiabortion activity mark moments of hostility to female independence.

The epoch of illegal abortion may be broken down into four periods. The first
covers the time from the criminalization of abortion state-by-state,
accomplished nationwide by 1880, to 1930. This period, covering fifty years, is
heavily marked by continuity. As other historians have also found, the
reproductive lives of most women and the day-to-day practice of most physicians
changed slowly. In this period, abortion was widely accepted and was practiced
in women's homes and in the offices of physicians and midwives. The diversity
of practitioners, the privacy of medical practice, and the autonomy of
physicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made the
widespread medical practice of abortion possible. A crackdown on abortion
occurred between 1890 and 1920 as specialists in obstetrics renewed the earlier
campaign against abortion, and the medical profession was drawn into the
state's enforcement system.

The structural transformation that occurred during the 1930s, the second
period, was crucial for the history of abortion. Abortion became more available
and changed location. As the practice moved from private offices and homes to
hospitals and clinics, abortion was consolidated in medical hands and became
more visible. The changes wrought by the Depression accelerated the pace of
change in the coming decades, particularly in the methods of enforcing the
criminal abortion laws.

The third period was marked by increasing restrictions on abortion by state
and medical authorities and intensifying demand for abortion from women of all
groups. This period begins in 1940, when the new methods of controlling
abortion were first instituted, and continues through 1973, when they were
dismantled. In reaction to the growing practice of abortion as well as apparent
changes in female gender and reproductive patterns, a backlash against abortion
developed. 1940 marks a dividing line as hospitals instituted new policies, and
police and prosecutors changed their tactics. The repression of abortion was
part of the repression of political and personal deviance that took place in
the 1940s and 1950s. Yet even in this period, the practice of abortion expanded
in new directions in response to relentless demand. The new repression of
abortion, however, was devastating for women. A dual system of abortion,
divided by race and class, developed. During the postwar period, the
criminalization of abortion produced its harshest results.

A new stage in the history of abortion, the movement to legalize it, overlaps
with the third period. The movement to decriminalize abortion began in the
mid-1950s and arose out of the difficult experiences resulting from the
repression of abortion in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1950s, a handful of
physicians began to challenge the very abortion laws their profession had
advocated a century earlier. The progress of that challenge attests to the
continuing power of the medical profession to make public policy regarding
reproduction. As legal reform moved forward, a new feminist movement arose,
which radically transformed the movement for legal change. When the women's
movement described abortion as an aspect of sexual freedom, they articulated a
new feminist meaning for abortion; when they demanded abortion as a right, they
echoed generations of women.

The structure of this book follows this periodization. The first half of the
book uncovers the history of abortion from the late nineteenth century through
the 1920s. Chapters 1 through 4 each cover different aspects of abortion, from
women's lives to practice to politics to enforcement, during the first
half-century of illegal abortion. The changes of the 1930S, both medical and
social, precipitated other changes. The second half of the book traces the
history of abortion in chronologically ordered chapters concluding with the
U.S. Supreme Court decisions that ended the era of illegal abortion.

Women's history of abortion needs to be examined both as a commonly felt need
to control reproduction, arising from women's biological capacity to bear
children and social relations that assign childbearing to women, and in terms
of differences among women. This book differentiates among women by class, race
and ethnic identity, and marital status. Though class did not absolutely
determine access to or safety of abortion, class position helped define when a
woman felt she needed an abortion and affected the type available to her. In
general, urban women had greater access to abortion than rural women, though
some rural women located abortionists in their areas or traveled to cities for
abortions. Race played a less obvious role in access to abortion, though the
grim statistics of the postwar period show the connection between
discrimination and death. I have made a specific effort to locate sources
related to African Americans in order to learn more about black women's use of
abortion and how race shaped the history of abortion. Evidence concerning women
of color is meager, however, until the 1930s, when medical and sociological
studies began separating their findings by race. Before then, contemporary
observers tended to focus their attention on the differences among many (white)
foreign-born ethnic groups.

This book integrates a national analysis of the history of abortion with a
local study. The advantage of this approach is that it connects everyday life
and local medical and legal practice to national policy. It examines that
relationship rather than assuming that all the public policy action takes place
on the federal level without reference to local and "private" events. I select
a major metropolis in order to uncover the nature of both abortion practices
and police enforcement of the criminal abortion laws. Chicago, the second
largest city in the nation, is the focus of my local study. Chicago, the city
in "the heartland" that has of ten served as a metaphor for the spirit of
America, was also known as an important medical center (the home of the AMA)
and as a regional center for abortion. Trains brought European immigrants, men
and women migrating from farms to the city, African Americans moving from the
South to the North, all going to live and work in Chicago. The same trains
brought women looking for abortions. Directing my attention to one city enabled
me to uncover the nitty-gritty details of the practice and regulation of
abortion.

Though much of my analysis of the history of abortion draws on Chicago as a
case study, sources verify that my findings hold true for other cities, large
and small. Throughout I present national data and trends as well as regional
ones and take note of patterns elsewhere. The book moves back and forth from a
national overview of abortion practices and politics to a close look at events
in Chicago. As medical practice became more standardized in hospitals, the
story becomes a more national one and key events take place in other cities:
New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C.,
and elsewhere. This is primarily a study of abortion in urban areas, where
abortion was concentrated. I comment occasionally on practices in rural areas,
but the history of reproductive control and abortion is likely to be somewhat
different there.

Legal records, most notably lower-level court and criminal trial records, and
medical literature make up the foundation of my research. I have also surveyed
other government documents, newspapers, popular periodicals, hospital records,
and manuscript collections. Using these materials, I have delineated how
medical thinking and state regulation have changed over time. Yet this is more
than a study of prescriptive literature or policy. I have uncovered the
circumstances of hundreds of actual induced abortions and reconstructed
changing abortion practices. This study periodizes the history of abortion for
the first time.

This book presents the lives of many women and their abortions in rich detail
in order to convey the variety and intricacy of the situations that made
abortion necessary for women. It is in the minutiae of women's lives that we
can discover why women had abortions and how they won sympathy from physicians
who belonged to a profession dedicated to fighting abortion. Abortion was a
moment in a woman's reproductive life. It cannot be separated from sexual
relations or reproduction as a whole. Women themselves did not separate them,
nor should we, whether analyzing abortion in the past or present. This book
deepens our understanding of the female experience of reproduction and the
connections between sexuality, contraception, pregnancy, and childbirth. At its
most fundamental, a policy that restricts abortion is one that forces women
into maternity. Without contraceptives and abortion, most women in heterosexual
relationships will become pregnant and bear children, whether they want to or
not. When women sought abortions, they often revealed the texture of
heterosexual relations and the rest of their lives. Many situations made
enduring pregnancy unbearable to women. In using abortion, women rebelled
against the law and asserted their sense that the decision to carry a pregnancy
to term or to abort was theirs to make. A few expressed in words as well as in
action the view that abortion was their right. The experiences of women's
private lives and private practices over the course of one hundred years
altered medical thinking and reshaped public policy. Despite the fact that
women's abortion narratives are part of our own contemporary discourse, the
stories told here have long been hidden.